What is Civilization? 2. Markers

Europeans attached definite markers onto the skeleton of “progress.”  Generally, of course, anything European was better than anything Indian.  (Though there are interesting stories about how Europeans came to adopt some Indian ways of life.  For example, it took time, trial, and error, for the French to learn the value of the canoe over the row boat.  It would be an interesting book to draw out the stories in a variety of areas.)

There is no agreed upon “essence” of civilization that Indians lacked and Europeans had, but certain clusters of attributes often appear.  Whites believed that in Indian culture the land was held by the community, individuals gained status by giving things away, the tribe demanded loyalty, nature was animated and perhaps worshiped, the legal system was rudimentary and based in nature or tradition, Indians were illiterate, and they fed themselves primarily by hunting and gathering.

Whites, by contrast, insisted on private property (especially with regard to land), that status is achieved by how much you can accumulate, that the nation-state deserved the highest loyalty, that nature must be conquered, that their own legal system was an achievement in dispensing justice, that reading and writing were fundamental to civilization, and that farming and ranching were appropriate occupations for civilized peoples.

If I had to define a “center” to these mutually exclusive lists, it would be the notion of land as private property.  Everything else is required to validate and ensure the security of private property.  John Locke would be proud.

Adams points out that the function of the Dawes Act of 1887 was to break up the loyalty to the tribe by parceling out the land of the Indian reservations to individuals.

Here again, a few notes:  First, to me these markers provide a very narrow take on what civilization is, but it does indicate that critiques of private property (Christian, Marxist, Anarchist, etc.) may in fact go to the heart of the American experiment.

Second, Christianity.  Europeans simply assumed, on the basis of long tradition, that theirs was a “Christian society” even a “Christian civilization” or a “Christian nation.”  Indians, then, would need to become Christians if they had any hope of being civilized. This take on Christianity is even more narrow, though whether Catholics (France, Spain, Portugal) or Protestants (Britain) were in charge seemed to make little difference in the approach to Indians.  This seems to me a strong indication of how thoroughly the church had become subject to the state.  More on this later.

Third, Europeans were always split on whether “civilized” just meant “white” such that neither blacks, nor Indians, nor Asians could ever truly participate in “civilization.”  Andrew Jackson, whose refusal to enforce the law as determined by the Supreme Court created the “Trail of Tears” [I still don’t understand why this did not create a constitutional crisis], said in his second inaugural address that the destruction of the Indians by the whites was exactly parallel to “the extinction of one generation to make room for another.”  That is, Indians, not even the Cherokee, those who had most adapted to the civilized American ways listed above, could ever be civilized.  So they died, but not of old age, the way one generation makes room for another.